Home > The majority text advocates claim that the critical text never
did circulate out of Egypt, and as a result never spread through the Roman Empire, where the first century congregations of the church
were located. Is this true?

The majority text advocates claim that the critical text never
did circulate out of Egypt, and as a result never spread through the Roman Empire, where the first century congregations of the church
were located. Is this true?

This is easy to demonstrate: just
look at the apparatus of the Nestle-Aland text (or the tc notes
in the NET Bible) and you will see that the critical text had
broad circulation, and early. I think the way the point is
usually framed is this: The earliest MSS all come from Egypt,
and therefore they do not represent the whole Mediterranean
region. But there are severe problems with this thesis.

(a) It
assumes that the MSS that were discovered in Egypt were
produced in Egypt. But that is not only an unproven
assumption, it is almost surely wrong in many cases. For
example, Kurt Aland notes that there was no large church in
Egypt sufficient to produce MSS in a scriptorium until the
second half of the second century. Yet, we have evidence
that the so-called Alexandrian text existed much earlier than
that (e.g., Aleph and B agreements; P75 and B agreements;
early patristic writers who quote the Alexandrian text, etc.).
This must almost surely mean that the Alexandrian text,
though it derives its name from the leading city of Egypt in the
ancient world, did not originate there.

(b) The assumption
also is that Egyptian provenance = Alexandrian texttype.
However, this is demonstrably incorrect. The papyri which
come from Egypt belong to the Alexandrian (both primary
and secondary Alexandrian), Western, and even Caesarean
texts. None of the early papyri--indeed, none of the papyri of
any age as far as I am aware--belong to the Byzantine
texttype. Now, how can we account for this situation? Surely
it must indicate that because of the dry climate, Egypt was a
repository of early MSS from all over the Roman empire. To
be sure, the predominant text of Egypt would be in the
majority, but MSS of other texttypes would also be expected
to show up, as indeed they have. All except the Byzantine
text.

(c) Finally, we really do not know where most of our MSS
came from. For example, Vaticanus was discovered in the
Vatican Library in the 1400s when the first catalog appeared.
No one knows where it came from. Sinaiticus was found at
St. Catherine's Monastery at Mt. Sinai. But it surely did not
originate there, since the MS is 200 years OLDER than the
monastery! There are so many problems with the facile
solutions of the MT crowd that the whole house of cards
begins to crumble.

By the way, I used to be largely
persuaded by their arguments. And I held to that view
tenaciously for 17 years. But after I did some serious
investigation with an open mind, I changed my views. The
evidence is what did it for me.